"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Archive for the ‘Must Read Monday’ Category

Gayle Brandeis grew up in the Chicago area and has been writing poems and stories since she was four years old. She is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), Dictionary Poems (Pudding House Publications), the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage (Ballantine) and Delta Girls (Ballantine), and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns (Holt), which won a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. She released The Book of Live Wires, the sequel to The Book of Dead Birds, as an e-book in 2011. 2017 brings the release of two new books: in June, a collection of poetry, The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press) and in November, a memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide (Beacon Press.)

Gayle’s poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies (such as Salon, The Rumpus, The Nation, and The Mississippi Review) and have received several awards, including the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, a Barbara Mandigo Kelley Peace Poetry Award, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. Her essay on the meaning of liberty was one of three included in the Statue of Liberty’s Centennial time capsule in 1986, when she was 18. In 2004, the Writer Magazine honored Gayle with a Writer Who Makes a Difference Award.

Gayle currently teaches in the low residency MFA programs at Antioch University Los Angeles and Sierra Nevada College, where she was named Distinguished Visiting Professor/Writer in Residence 2014-2015. She served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012-2014, acting as literary ambassador to and for the Inland Empire region of Southern California. During her tenure, she worked extensively with the community, including at-risk youth, and edited the anthology ORANGELANDIA: The Literature of Inland Citrus. Gayle is currently editor in chief of Tiferet Journal and founding editor of Lady/Liberty/Lit. She is also mom to kids born in 1990, 1993 and 2009.

“From the title poem, The Selfless Bliss of the Body… “somewhere under skirts/of black, a nun brings/herself to orgasm/” to the final poem, “Last Words”… “my love/for the world riding/ my last breath- I love you/ I love you I love you” I am enthralled, inspired; each poem a gift of wonder.”–Alma Luz Villanueva, author of Gracias

“My whole body arcing / to face itself..” Brandeis, the “Chagall woman” writes at the beginning of this volume. Yes, it is quite a feat to face the translucent and filmy, vibrating and silent flux of being and “almost-not-being.” For this reason alone, we must rise and applaud. Gayle offers us a rarely seen contemporary woman-metaphysics — a liquid diamond made of light areoles and auras, a floating naked body of “surrender,” of “danger zones,” of self-silhouettes — a “pulse of pure movement.” These undulations of perception, eros, and constant questioning, body-life and social investigations of the continuous blur of woman-existence is key to all of our ongoing world chatter. Perhaps, with this book, this almost-self-magic collection, all of us can notice what it takes to inscribe and see our hardened rushing lives as truly meaningful, even though they come and go, as we peer at them. A monumental achievement.–Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States

Rachel Abramson Dacus is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of three poetry books and a spoken word poetry CD. Her most recent book, Gods of Water and Air, combines poetry, prose, and drama. It follows two poetry collections, Earth Lessonsand Femme au Chapeau. Gods of Water and Airis a passionate exploration of personal transformation, delving into everything from reincarnation to growing up with an artist and rocket scientist father, to living in an immigrant community on the Pacific Ocean.

Praise for Gods of Water and Air

“This is a book to relish for such insights, by a poet clearly up for the ride, and not afraid of the risks.” — Rhina Espaillat, author of Where Horizons Go

He is the editor of The American Poetry Journal, owner of Dream Horse Press, publisher of the Orphic Prize and APJ Book Prize series, as well as the first animal rights poetry anthology And We The Creatures.

J.P. Dancing Bear has been invited to give poetry readings around the US.

For nearly 15 years he was the host of “Out of Our Minds” a weekly radio show for public radio station KKUP featuring some of today’s best contemporary poets. Bear works with Nicaraguan poet Blanca Castellon on translating of her poetry into English, the first will appear in Redactions, Marlboro Review, International Poetry Review, iconoclast, Pirene’s Fountain, Numéro Cinq and The Bitter Oleander. He has also worked with Mexican poet Oscar Wong to translate his work into English. He also is currently working with Yu Xuan to translate contemporary Chinese poet, Sheng Tong (aka Holy Child), into English.

Jessie Van Eerden is the author of Glorybound (WordFarm, 2012), My Radio Radio (Vandalia Press 2016), and most recently, her collection of portrait essays,The Long Weeping, just released from Orison Books.

A West Virginia native, Jessie holds a BA in English from West Virginia University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The Oxford American, River Teeth, Image, Bellingham Review, Willow Springs, Rock & Sling, Appalachian Heritage, Ruminate, and other publications. Her prose has been selected for inclusion in Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia(Vandalia Press); Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean (Ohio University Press); Red Holler(Sarabande); Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, Seventh Edition (Longman); Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical (Cascade Books); and Best American Spiritual Writing (Houghton Mifflin).

Jessie has taught for over fifteen years in college classrooms and in adult literacy programs. She lives in West Virginia where she directs the low-residency MFA writing program of West Virginia Wesleyan College.

“In these startlingly honest and imaginative essays, van Eerden enlarges the world around her, giving flesh to what is all too often flattened by the outside eye, anointing places and people and the throbbing spaces between them as she searches out and sings litanies to what she calls the “larger body I belonged to and could not leave.” Lush and razor-sharp, The Long Weeping shimmers with intelligence and grace. The truest essays I’ve read in a long time.”

—Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread, Queen of the Fall, andLadies Night at the Dreamland

“Van Eerden is one of the best essayists working today if judged by her craft and intellect alone, but her gifts go beyond those: she is also one of the most honest. The Long Weeping turns a visionary eye and a laser mind on subjects often simplified or even scorned by contemporary culture: white poverty; mysticism; love of family; the wisdom of modest people. Van Eerden is brave enough to say the hard things. She’s strong enough to love the hard places.”

Cat Pleska is a seventh generation West Virginian, and an amazingly loving and generous person. She is the author of Riding on Comets, and most recently, she published a cookbook with a sense of humor, One Foot in the Gravy–Hooked on the Sauce. Cat is a writer, editor, educator, publisher, and storyteller. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. She is an essayist for West Virginia Public Radio and a book reviewer for the Charleston Gazette. She coedited the anthology Fed from the Blade: Tales and Poems from the Mountains. Pleska has been published in literary magazines and newspapers throughout the Appalachian region. She lives in Scott Depot, West Virginia, with her husband, Dan, one dog, four cats, and with a daughter, Katie, in nearby St. Albans.

“The gifts of Cat Pleska’s Riding on Comets are many: it is fresh, candid, gently humorous, tautly lyrical, and deeply moving.”-Lisa Knopp, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte

This is a storyteller who knows how to piece together shards of story into a brilliant mosaic of a life. A joy to read.”–Janice Gary is the author of Short Leash: A Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance, winner of two Silver 2014 Nautilus Awards and a 2014 Eric Hoffer Prize for Memoir.

Cat Pleska’s restrained but graceful prose allows us to witness four generations through the eyes of the author, first as a child and then through the years that followed as her people live, age, and die. The details Pleska offers have the immediacy of truths well told, with a resolute eye and spacious heart, neither shying away from family and personal dysfunction, nor sentimentalizing the bonds of fear and love that held her family together.”–Geoffrey Cameron Fuller is an author of the true crime Pretty Little Killers and the crime thriller Full Bone Moon

A former English teacher, Helen Losse was born in Joplin, MO and educated at Missouri Southern State University (BSE, 1969), where she majored in secondary education and English and Wake Forest University (MALS, 2000), where she studied African American history and religion and creative writing. Her master’s thesis, Making All things New: The Redemptive Value of Unmerited Suffering In the Life and Works of Martin Luther King Jr., is available in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. She wrote four entries in the Encyclopedia of North Carolina.

She is the author of four books of poetry, Evey Tender Reed, Facing a Lonely West, Seriously Dangerous, and Better With Friends, as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have been anthologized in Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VII: North Carolina, and Kakalak 2014, nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, and three times for a Best of the Net award, one of which was a finalist. She was featured by Kathryn Stripling Byer, Poet Laureate of NC, on the North Carolina Arts Council web site along with two other Winston-Salem poets. Helen’s poem “Four Snapshots of the Sea-Going Boats,” won 1st place in the 2009 Davidson County Writers’ Guild Adult Writing Contest. The former Poetry Editor for The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, she is now an Associate Poetry Editor for Kentucky Review.

Helen lives with her husband Bill in Winston-Salem, NC, where she occasionally writes book reviews for various literary magazines. She is a rail fan, a NASCAR fan, a Tony Stewart fan, a Kyle Busch fan, a Ryan Newman fan, a Kurt Busch, a Carl Edwards fan, a fan of the flip, a Dallas Cowboys fan, a Wake Forest Demon Deacons fan, and a fan of the Carolina Tar Heels. Helen is a Roman Catholic who loves Christmas. She and her husband have two grown sons.

Praise for Every Tender Reed

“If books of poetry were considered fitting contributions, Helen Losse’s Every Tender Reed, would be among the most heartfelt gifts in a church offering plate. With a keen eye for craft, Losse takes readers on a personal pilgrimage—pondering everything from the beauty of God’s creations to what it might feel like to “be consumed” in pursuit of spiritual purity. Written with fierce tenderness and the courage it takes to write poems both honest and true, this fine collection is a must read. “—Terri Kirby Erickson, author of A Lake of Light and Clouds

“Helen Losse’s Every Tender Reed resonates with a tone of loving memory and forgiveness—a promise for the good life, the verses raising blinds on the dark to brighten songs born to all the world’s beauty. Grace becomes a natural outgrowth of Imagination’s repose. Red clover soft-lights the people; all of us are the ever-present tender reeds.”—Shelby Stephenson, North Carolina Poet Laureate

“Losse’s Every Tender Reed is penance in poetry—honoring the reader as much as the Creator. This volume, for the most part, is a serene journey with the author as she walks the Path toward the enlightenment of self-knowledge.”—Patricia Gomes, Poet Laureate, City of New Bedford, MA

Al Maginnes is the author of seven full length collections and four chapbooks of poems, most recently The Next Place (Iris Press, 2017). He lives in Raleigh, North Carolinaand teaches at Wake Technical Community College. His poems and reviews have appeared widely. He is music editor for Connotations Press and a member of Liberty Circus, a music and spoken word collective dedicated to raising money for those who work with immigrants and other forms of social justice.